


lost ghosts

by labime



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dark, F/M, Peter Pan Retelling, Power Dynamics, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-07 13:04:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20976353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labime/pseuds/labime
Summary: The boy was mesmerizing. He was reckless and rebellious and daring and mischievous. The boy does not exist.





	lost ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> i was making an aesthetic edit and then this happened ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The boy is no boy.

He is a man who dressed himself as a boy so that the edge of his smile would only elicit a challenge and keep fear at bay, so that the little boys and girls he whisks away to Neverland may choose to come willingly, for who would spurn a life of adventures and indulgence, trapped as they are by rules, dying as they are while their parents break their bones and peel their dreams from their skin to enclose them into a trap of conformity.

So when he came to her and offered his hand, poured over her fairy dust that glimmered in vibrant gold and green, freckled with crimson and violet hues like she had never seen before, and made her fly, Caroline did not hesitate, did not linger long enough to be held back. She should have.

It is a primeval magic that lives in the silver cascades of water which are always warm and clean and sweet, in the trees standing high and tall and folding over her at night with branches that whispers of secrets she refuses to hear, in the soil beneath her feet and the mud that vibrates between her toes, wrathful and barely restrained. It reaches so high even the sky is a lie, always beautiful, always blue and pristine, by day or by night, sprinkled with stars or crowded with the light of the sun.

There is a price demanded for that island, and it is in blood that the payment must be made.

Caroline looks and smiles. Her lips are sewn into a smile that shows two rows of white teeth, and her eyes are bright and wide, her face carved by fairy's magic and her laugh—stolen and ripped from her—keeps tumbling from her mouth like stones thrown into water, deep and hollow.

The boy was mesmerizing. He was reckless and rebellious and daring and mischievous. The boy does not exist. Nik was a lie Klaus told and, without subterfuge, Caroline sees for the first time what he really is. The knowledge—the _evidence_—leaves her breathless, residual disbelief humming underneath her skin.

That man is a carnivore. None of his deceptive tricks can hide it now, and she smiles as she sees Klaus killing the children—_my_ _friends_, her mind wails as she struggles to break out of her own body, each word she tries to get out a jagged knife digging into her vocal cords—and watches, dread like thorns in her heart, as the earth opens and swallows the blood greedily, the rocks turn and squash fragile skulls, and the waters in the lake swirls up and clutches down at flailing legs.

_There is magic in that place_, he uttered the words like a secret, the golden-haired boy that made her blush and smile, as he gently lowered her on the ground, the journey from London to Neverland having caused her head to turn dizzy and her feet unsteady.

Caroline laughed and nodded. She didn’t ask what kind of magic it was. She should have.

It had been a warning she hadn’t discerned and his disappointment at her gullibility had manifested in indifference. She hadn’t know then, that she should be glad for it, that his curt dismissal was a blessing and his inattention a chance to escape. Inadvertently, gradually, unwillingly, she roused his interest. A suspicious glance at the moving hills, a reserved laugh when the lost boys came back with a manacled pirate and beat him with sticks, hollering rowdy japes as they did, a growing curiosity for the island… questions about how long they’d stay, when they would go home, what their parents must think, whether they were worried.

They had planned to leave, last night, Elena and Bonnie and Jeremy. Bonnie knew a way, she’d affirmed. So they had stolen a purse of fairy dust and a map from the imprisoned pirate, had waddled through the forest of sleeping trees that had whipped their sharp branches at them, vexed and resentful at the disturbance, followed the labyrinthine path to the shore that would allow an escape, turned and turned, restless as the dawn crawled over the sky, black turning to navy and then to a softer blue, and then—

He had come upon them, tall and sinister, with forest-green clothes soaked in blood, so different Caroline hardly recognized him, at first. _Older and cruel and merciless._

She would cry, if she was allowed to. and she would scream, if she had a voice. But she is in possession of neither. She looks on and peers at the massacre with a joyful expression. A pretty little doll, all porcelain and soft edges and painted pastel colors, frozen and lifeless, but not empty. There is a rage churning in her chest, bilious and searing, and she thinks, _I kill you_. She sees him carelessly steps over Elena and Jeremy's broken bodies and thinks, Y_ou won't keep me here forever. I will leave and I will grow old and gray of hair and I will outlive you. And no one will remember you or that place._

"Oh, Caroline," he bemoans with a lazy, dramatic flair.

His voice would have made her jump if she still had the ability to move, her survival instincts soaring as his breath crawls along her neck, her shoulders shaking with a shiver. He moves like a predator, slow and sure, with a grace his erstwhile childishness had shrouded from her eyes.

“Did you not learn anything here, love? This island is dangerous. Everything—_everyone_ belongs to it, to me, and even your thoughts are not your own. The winds can hear," he says, leans down, too close to her, teeth sharpening into something terrifying, chilled water running into her veins, and suddenly she is gripped by the desire to curl into her mother's arms one last time, "and so can I."

She should have listened to her when she said Caroline ought to never talk to stranger, but he had seemed so nice when he had found her on the evening of her eleven birthday, crying over the fact that her father would not come and that her mother had lost her temper with her, and that Vicky Donovan had said Elena's birthday party last year had been so grand hers couldn’t compare. How gullible she had been, then.

She wishes she could go back to that day, to the few hours before she climbed the ladder to that treehouse, and yearns to be brimming with childish distress again, looking around through a veil of harmless naivety. How had she seen the world, she wonders, before she first saw a monster's hand delving into her friend’s chest and tear a heart to eat it raw?

"You can move," he says and, immediately, her limbs are hers again, blood rushing to sore, trembling muscles.

Fists clenching, she orders herself not to move, even as she wants to run and dash away and try to attain the pirate ship she noticed sailing not far away from the shoreline. _They has been so close. _But he would catch her, and the punishment would not be merciful and it would most certainly be definitive, and she is just a little girl, scared of death and yearning to live.

His fingers trail over her neckline before settling on her chest, palm flat again the thrum of her heartbeats and eyes curious, almost entertained as he tilts his head. _What will I do with you?_ she almost hears the drawl of his voice, careless and facetious, but beyond that she catches the phantom of his cogitation drifting off to her, his genuine indecision as to her fate. She flinches. _Yes_, Caroline's thoughts echo his, quivering and twisting, frost filling her mind, _what will you do with me?_

(Time has stopped, for him and for her and for that place. It is a festering blessing, the dust of age that will never settle on her bones, the knowledge that beyond the weeping mist that guards his enchanted island, everything is still the same. If Klaus were to bring her back to the safety of her bed, she would find that the sun had not yet risen and that the watch would strike for her awakening only hours later.

But this place is not made for her. Her body is too frail and human, he explains. He explains other things.

A chunk of the world had swelled from nothing. A witch had licked salt and blood and death from her open palm and made a sanctuary for her children, so that she might never lose another. But for the sea and the sky she displaced, the trees and the mountains she splayed over bare sand, the magic she infused the core of the island with, the butchered space begot a payment. She had not known such a thing, or had chosen to ignore it; of that her own son was unsure.

The rest—what became of his mother and siblings—he does not tell her and Caroline bites on her questions, sensing ire in his fists and dread once more cresting in her chest. He was red-bearded, that monster of a man, and the stench of dried blood hung to his shape. If her suppositions were proved to be true, if his family had indeed perished by his hand, then a confrontation would forfeit any chances of an escape.

_I will turn you_, Klaus says, later. _You will be unchanging. You will be immortal._

_I will be dead then_, ponders Caroline, for what is life if not transformation, and what does she care for that illusion of eternity if it means spending it away from a mother she loves and a father she misses, with her friends’ lives wafting out of the sickly sweet air of the island she will see for the rest of her life.

There no seasons on that island, only one night and one day, each captured as the world was cut to carve this shelter. No one lives in that everlasting day of spring for growth is impeded and change is impossible. They could be rocks, both of them, and no difference would be made. She know it even as she accepts with trembling hands and quivering lips the torn wrist he is offering her. _As long as you drink from me, you will always be young_, he says. Caroline drinks. _You will live forever_, he says. But she will not. She must go home, then and only then, she will truly be alive.)

In the end, when she awakes, they are once again in a treehouse and he once again offers her a choice and she takes a fistful of golden fairy dust in her hand like the cold, dead thing it is and pretends she can’t see past the magic glittering at its seams as she says she will stay with him forever.

It’s a lie.


End file.
